Giving Students a Voice: Tech Tip

Hello everyone! As I work throughout the district I have had a bunch of questions about helping our students get more practice recording their voices. Since so many students take the ACCESS test, practicing recording their voices not only helps with preparing them for the test, but also enhances their speaking skills.

If you work with littles, one easy way to get them speaking is Chatterpix. Chatterpix can be used on the iPads and Chromebooks. Students take or upload a picture and then use their finger to cut a "mouth" into their picture. They then can record their voices!

This is awesome for describing a character, retelling a story with beginning, middle, and end, or even explaining their thinking on a math problem. The videos can be saved to the device and then imported into their Google drive accounts!

Free Read Aloud Books

So I just found another awesome tool to add to your elementary school classroom: Vooks! Vooks has classic and popular story titles done as a read aloud. This would be awesome to support a class wide guided reading or to be a literacy station during reading groups. Some of my kindergarten teachers are using this during their student's technology center during center time!






The best part is teachers get a whole year free!!!!!

Novel Effect to Bring Classroom Read Alouds to a Whole Other Level!!!

OMG! I’m really excited about this new find! The app, which is available for iOS and Android, has a library full of books. It actually has a great range of newer books and classics. Once you have found the book you want to read, download it, grab your physical copy, push play and start to read. Novel effect follows along with your voice and adds background sound, music, and dialogue to your read aloud! Amazing!

Live Webcams

One of my favorite ways to transform a classroom is to add a live webcam! Live webcams can immerse your students into content like nothing else.

Reading an informational text about the ocean or ocean animals? Have students put on their scientist hats and make some observations about this:






Learning about space? Have this on while the students do group work:


If you go to YouTube, you can literally search any topic and and the words "live feed" or "live cameras" to it and you may hit the jackpot!

My favorite website, for live cams, is Explore.org. The host cams of animals and habitats and there is always something new to explore.

Live cams are fabulous to:

• Create understanding on the setting of a novel
• Study the geography of an area
• Support informational text

Adding live webcams is such a low prep thing to do and really adds a sense of excitement to the class!

Epic! Books for Research

Want to make sure your kiddos are safe while they are conducting research?  Use Epic Books! Their informational texts are amazing!!!! Struggling readers can choose the “Read to Me” Books for more content knowledge.